I’m looking at how a few museums and art collectives use twitter to spread awareness about their activities, upcoming shows, etc. I’ve said before that twitter is a great resource for groups like local theatres — with a few easy offers over twitter your foot traffic could increase.

@bklynartprjct is a Brooklyn-based art collective using twitter very well — posting links like crazy: newspaper articles about the group, slideshows of work, blog posts, emerging artists, et al. Even if only one out of ten links are clicked through, art links can go viral fast.

@brooklynmuseum uses the same successful strategies. Tweeting about the museum’s weekend schedule, links to the museum’s facebook, and my favorite – posting that they are open despite the museum web site being down.

Companies hopping on twitter could use twitter the same way: I would like to see a company posting about its unique employees, its human capital and knowledge base. Pictures from within the building, funky things. Show the CEO’s record collection.

Also, @ZekesGallery. I’m sure Zeke is a great guy and the gallery is top notch. But if you compare his tweets with the Brooklyn tweeters above, you’ll see the NY folk are using twitter more effectively in terms of awareness and attempts to drive traffic. (Alas, @ManitobaMuseum seems to have abandoned ship. We hardly knew ye, Manitoba…)

Mars is getting in on the twitter action, giving the marketing potential a go with its character @mrsgreen. The old saw went the green ones make you horny, right? Well to Mars’ credit, it is selling exclusively green packs of M&Ms for the upcoming Valentine’s Day holiday.

I noticed @mrsgreen about three days ago (she’s front and center on the twitter ‘featured’ window on public timeline) and to date she has 110 followers. I like @mrsgreen; there’s nothing deceptive or black hatty about her presence on twitter. Good clean fun. She won’t be the last anthropomorphic foodstuff we see on twitter this year, betcha.

Microjournalism, as it is called in today’s New York Times, is the latest trend in twitter usage and is now gaining speed as the campaign trail does the same. I follow @anamariecox and @newmediajim, two ‘microjournalists’ (somehow this microjournalism tag smacks of music critics coming up with the latest hyphenate a la ’emo-glitch-laptop-mom-core’…)

From article:

When I read Ms. Cox’s concise reportage — “McCain: ‘Willford Brimmley is our response to Chuck Norris.’ ” — the potential for parody was high enough, and Ms. Cox engages in sufficient parody that I had to double-check with newspaper accounts to find corroborating photographs of Mr. Brimley and Mr. McCain sharing a microphone.

The relation of a microblog to a blog post is often compared to the snippets of news on the ticker below the main news story on CNN or Sky TV News. Often a few pithy words is all the information you need to convey, and it does not detract from the main stories which are actually a different media.

I’m seeing this analogy more and more, and I have to say I like it. Friday food for thought…

MobiFeedLive is a very green, uber-beta fan app that analyzes twitter conversations. Use it to track trends and popularity of given words or to analyze link popularity by discovering how many people linked to a given URL. At present, the second most linked-to URL on Twitter is Station Ripper’s twitter app.

This fan app appears to be in its infancy, and it will be a good one to follow and use as it develops. They seem to be working on deeper metrics: link popularity over one day, three days, one week, last 30 days. With link age and link popularity together to compare, one could evaluate the average timespan required for optimal twitter spread, success rates of link stickiness.

A future feature I hope to see is a digest of user ids connected to that link’s popularity. Depending on what the link is related to, digests as these could serve as qualified leads.

Not neccessarily porn proper either…but how will adult entertainment get its piece of the twitter pie?

Agh. Did it again. *sigh*.

Here’s one example of a new user doing what she can to draw a crowd: @bambidollface. Her bio labels her a Bi Nympho Teen CumSlut, but thus far her posts are tame, on the whole. She should use links more.

@GirlieGurl has more success than @bambidollface. Her background is NSFW, but her tweets are tame. My guess is she is more established elsewhere among the interwebs. Has a home page in bio, prob a dirty lil number.

@Lexilapetina, bio says adult site owner. Also has home page in bio. Already I’m thinking they should embed their link in every tweet they do. (True for other businesses too, or just the internet lookin’s?) @audaciaray is a porn director and ‘sex nerd’, with many recent tweets from adult film awards ceremony. @hardnhorny also has a home page that sounds adult enough for me to resist clicking it and putting it on the pc’s history. His posts are protected, so as to whether he’s a fan or a biz, can’t tell. @MidwestTeenSex purports to be booked for the Katie Couric show. According to their bio, they make funny movies about teen sex.

And there’s plenty more users out there — you can click through replies from these users and learn more about the community. I’m betting sex would sell better in twitter if my ‘following’ weren’t visible to all. If that feature ever becomes optional (especially on a friend-by-friend basis), and the ‘following’ feature can get a little less transparent, adult entertainment will have way better results in twitter – like instant results.

I just signed up for Jott, which I will now use to tweet during my p.m. commute. (For the safety of your children, you don’t want me texting on the drive home.) For some reason my brain kicks into high gear during the drive home – similar to that syndrome where you always think of the wittiest retort after a debate – so now I can jott away.